Holgersson, Charlotte

Höök, Pia

Linghag, Sophie

Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden.

Wahl, Anna

Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden.

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2004 (English)Conference paper, Published paper (Other academic)

Abstract [en]

In Sweden, as in many other countries, most managers are men. In 1993 the Swedish government commissioned an inquiry[1]in order to find out to what extent men dominated management positions in Swedish business life at the time. Nine years later a follow up inquiry[2]was commissioned in order to once again measure the distribution of women and men at different organizational levels and the existence of work for change (see Regnö 2003a, 2003b). This paper is based both on the findings from the 2003 inquiry “Male Dominance in Transition. On Management Teams and Boards” (SOU 2003:16) and also on the work process, namely the support and resistance which faced the research team in their work with the inquiry. In the first section of the paper, the empirical findings from the survey (Regnö 2003a, 2003b) and interviews with change agents (Höök & Wahl 2003) will be presented. Then, the more theoretical discussions following the themes of women executives in a historical perspective (Svanström 2003), women and corporate boards (Karlsson Stider 2003), management and gender (Holgersson 2003a), young managers (Linghag 2003), and work for change (Höök 2003) will be summarized. The paper ends with a discussion on the work process and how actors from different areas of society, media, politics and business, intervened.

[1]SOU 1994:3 “Mäns föreställningar om kvinnor och chefskap” (published in English with the title “Men’s perceptions of women and management” (Wahl 1995)) included contributions by Anna Wahl and Pia Höök.